Expiration Date (66 page)

And then
up
abruptly became
down,
and both of them were falling headfirst out of the narrow can while air bubbles clunked and rattled past them; Sullivan’s shoulders jammed in the narrower neck for a moment, but the water and a lot of loose metal disks coursing past him pushed him free—

And he fell through sunlit air and splashed heavily into shallow water, twisting his neck and shoulder against a muddy bottom and catching Elizalde’s knee hard in the small of his back.

When he struggled up to a sitting position the water was rocking around his chest and his eyes were blinking in the golden light of late afternoon. He was leaning back against vertical stone, wheezing and panting, and through the sopping tangles of his hair he could see two branching tree trunks standing up from the shadowed brown water a couple of yards away from where he sat, and, a couple of yards beyond them, a low cement coping and a hedge; a few of the top leaves shone golden green in the last rays of sunlight.

His hands were spasmodically clawing in the silty mud under him, trying to find a tree root to grip in case the world was going to turn upside down again.

Elizalde sat up in the water beside him and held on to his shoulder while she coughed out muddy water and whoopingly sucked air into her lungs. Her mud-matted hair was long again, and the lean, tired face was her own. When he could see that she would be able to breathe, Sullivan cautiously leaned his head back and looked up. He was sitting against a square marble pillar that supported a marble crosspiece far
overhead. He and Elizalde were apparently in the south corner of the lake, in the tail-end lagoon behind the marble walls of the Douglas Fairbanks monument. The world was holding still, and he began to relax, muscle by muscle. There was a twisting itch in his ear then, and he nearly thrust his finger into it; but the buzzing voice said,
“You’ve got to get to the Paramount wall—but first grope around in the water and get Houdini's hands”

“Okay, Dad.”

Sullivan pushed away from the pillar and slowly waded on his knees out across the pool, his face bent so closely over the water that his harsh breaths blew rings onto the surface, and he swept his hands through the velvety silt. Elizalde was just breathing hoarsely and watching him.

Faintly he could hear a rapid creak of metal and quacking laughter, but the sounds were distant and not drawing closer.

The silt was thick with pennies and nickels and dimes, but he tossed them aside—Elizalde inhaled sharply when she saw the first handful of them—and at last he found the plaster hand with the missing finger and silently handed it to her, and then a few moments later he found the other.

“Up this far slope to the service road,” he whispered to Elizalde, “and then turn right and hug the wall all the way back west. The car is—”

“You were
in
there,
with
me,” interrupted Elizalde tensely, “right? The can was full of
salt water
this time, wasn’t it?”

Sullivan sucked the elastic cuff of his leather jacket; and he thought that it still tasted of salt. “I don’t know if it really
happened
or not,” he said, “but I was in there with you.’

In Sullivan’s ear the voice resonated again:
“At the end there, that was Houdini's famous escape from the padlocked milk can. Big news in the teens and twenties.”

Sullivan helped Elizalde stand up in the yielding mud, and then he waded to the coping, stepped up onto it, and threw one leg over the hedge. “My dad says that was Houdini’s famous escape from the milk can,” he said, quietly.

“This time it was ours,” Elizalde said, reaching up from the water for Sullivan to give her a boost. “Happy birthday.”

N
ICHOLAS
B
RADSHAW
had shambled slowly out across the shadow-streaked parking lot to Pete Sullivan’s shrouded van, and by the back bumper he crouched to pick up the little magnet they’d taken out of the telephone. Before turning his steps toward one of the garages, he put the magnet in his mouth.

I wonder, he thought stolidly, if you’re held entirely accountable for sins you commit after you’re dead. Kids before the age of reason aren’t considered capable of knowing right from wrong, so if a five-year-old kills a playmate, he’s not blamed.
Or not much. He’s just a little kid, after all. So what about adults past the age of… expiration? We’re just
dead
guys, after all.

He thought of the “beasties,” the solid ghosts who wandered up from the beach in the evenings and hung around outside his office door, waiting for Bradshaw to set out paper plates with smooth pebbles on them. The poor old creatures could be vindictive—they sometimes pulled license plates off parked cars, and once or twice had got into incomprehensible squabbles among themselves and left broken-off fingers and noses to be swept up in the morning along with the usual litter of rocks and beer cans—but it would be folly to assign
blame
to them. “Wicked” was too concrete an adjective to be supported by the frail nouns that they were.

He tugged open the creaking garage door, and dug out a folded tarpaulin and a big paint tray from behind the dusty frame of a ‘55 Chevy. He carried them outside and pulled the door back down.

When he had lugged everything across the lot and up into the office, Kootie was still snoring heavily in the Naugahyde chair by the desk.

Bradshaw dropped his burdens and stumped into the kitchen and shook a steak knife free of the litter in one of the cabinet drawers.

He would work without thinking—he would spread the tarpaulin out across the rug and lay the paint tray in the middle of it; then he would lift Kootie out of the chair…

But he himself was
not
one of those mindless solid ghosts. He couldn’t honestly take refuge in that shabby category. He was dead (through no fault of his own), but his soul had not ever vacated his body.

His face was cool, and when he brushed his hand across his forever-unstubbled jowls, it came away wet. Tears or sweat, it was Eat-’Em-&-Weep juice either way.

Bradshaw would, he was determined that he would, simply lean over the boy’s face and, with the telephone magnet between his teeth, inhale the boy’s dying breath.

Bradshaw would thus get Edison. And Edison could monitor Bradshaw’s body during the long nights aboard the boat, so that Bradshaw himself could sleep, and dream—just as Kootie had been able to sleep while the old ghost walked and spoke and looked out for him.

I’ve never eaten a ghost, Bradshaw thought; well, why
would
I, none of the average run of ghosts could responsibly
watch the store
while I slept. But Thomas Edison could.

Thomas Edison is probably the
only
ghost that I’d do this to get, he thought, and certainly the only very powerful one
I’ll
ever get a shot at; the only one that could let me safely dream. I wouldn’t…sell
my soul
, ever, except for this. It’s God’s fault, really, for putting this within my reach.

He remembered the boy saying,
I wont be any trouble, mister.

Bradshaw stood over the snoring boy, staring at the pulse under his ear; and then he looked down at his right hand, which was gripping the steak knife.

For the first time since his death in 1975, his hand was trembling.

H
UNCHING ALONG
through the shadows under Paramount Studios’ corrugated aluminum back wall that was streaked with rust stains and gap-toothed with broken windows, Sullivan thought of the broad sunny lanes and parking lots and white monolithic soundstages on the other side. When he had last been on the Paramount lot, in about 1980, there had even been a dirt-paved street of Old West buildings under a vast open-air mural of a blue sky.

“We made a hundred and four pictures there in 1915,”
said his father’s tiny voice in his ear,
“back when it was Lasky, DeMille, and Goldfish in charge, and we’d moved everything here from the barn at Vine and Selma. Sixteen frames a second, the old Lumiere standard. Now because of sound reproduction it’s twenty-four frames a second, ninety feet a minute, and nobody needs to know how to read in order to see a movie, and the purity of the silent silver faces is gone. For us, the graveyard extends all the way south to Melrose.”

Sullivan glanced back through the trees toward the Douglas Fairbanks lake. “Keep your voice down, Dad.”

“Keep
your
voice down,” whispered Elizalde, who of course couldn’t hear what his father was saying.

Gravestones stood in thickly clustered ranks outside the Beth Olam Mausoleum, and Sullivan felt as though he and Elizalde and his father were hiding behind a crowd. The shadowy human-shaped figures that stood among the stones seemed to be facing away almost vigilantly, as though guarding Arthur Patrick Sullivan’s retreat, and the multitudinous bass humming was louder.

“You got a lot of friends here, Dad?” Pete Sullivan whispered.

“Oh, sure,”
said the voice in his ear.
“Go up to the doors there, and rap
shave-and-a-haircut.”

“Just a sec,” Sullivan told Elizalde, and then he sprinted up the steps to the locked door of the mausoleum and rapped on the glass:
knock, knock, knock-knock, knock

From inside came the answering
knock, knock.

Elizalde was smiling and shaking her head as he rejoined her and they began walking north along the broad straight lane; receding perspective made the curbs seem to converge in the distance, and on the blue hills above the implicit intersection point stood once again the familiar white letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign. Why, Sullivan thought, can’t I get away from it?

“It’s a gravestone, too
,” said Sullivan’s father.

For a minute they trudged along in silence through the gathering twilight. A couple of cars were parked ahead, and real people were opening the doors and climbing in; Sullivan no longer felt that he and Elizalde were conspicuous intruders.

As they walked up to Bradshaw’s car Sullivan thought he heard laughter in the remote distance, but there was no triumph anymore in the cawing; and, from some
radio or tape player a bit closer, he heard the opening notes of Al Jolson’s “California Here I Come.”

I been away from you a long time
…Sullivan thought.

They climbed in and closed the doors gently. Sullivan started the engine, and as they drove out onto Santa Monica Boulevard and turned right, making oncoming cars swerve because of the way the Nova’s skewed front end seemed to be about to cross the divider line, Sullivan said, impulsively, “Dad, I don’t know if you knew it or not, but I didn’t swim out, to help you.”

Elizalde was looking out the window at the Chinese restaurant they were passing.

“I
knew it
,” buzzed the gnat in his ear.
“And we both know it wouldn’t have done any good if you had swum out, and we both know that isn’t an excuse you’ll look at.”

Sullivan hiked up a pack of Marlboros from the side pocket of his jacket and bit one cigarette out of it. “Did Sukie—Elizabeth—tell you that Kelley Keith is gunning for you?”

“I
knew she’d be waiting for me. So I came ashore hidden inside a sea monster. Grounded and damped to a flat magnetic line.”

Sullivan pushed in the cigarette-lighter knob. “What…brings you to town?” he asked, unable to keep the defensive flippancy out of his tone. He didn’t look at Elizalde.

“Why,
I got a free ticket to the coast
,” droned the gnat’s voice, possibly trying to imitate Sullivan’s tone,
“and I thought I’d look you kids up.”
The voice was silent, then said, “A
big one was switched on here, and all of us were sympathetically excited by it. I came out of the ocean, after God knows how long; to find that the broken stragglers of Elizabeth had joined me, and that you had never
—” The voice lapsed again.

“Had never what, Dad?” Sullivan asked softly, looking almost across Elizalde to see where he was going through the windshield. “Stopped running? Away from the surf, that would be, Angelica.” His smile was stiff. “I didn’t want to look back, that’s for sure. ‘I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Dusk: Be soon,’ remember that, Dad? Francis Thompson poem. I’ve always tried to…what, to have nothing permanent, leave nothing behind that would, like,
hang around
. I always hated things to be…etched in stone.”